If you’re looking for the perfect research repository tool for your organization, you’ve come to the right place.
A UX (User Experience) Research Repository stores research data, notes, and insights. These can be accessed when needed, ideally by everyone in the organization.
Check out our complete guide to repositories, and how to set one up from scratch here.
A good repository makes it easy for teams across the organization to find whatever data they need, whenever they need it.
In this article, we’ll review the popular repository tool Condens, and the best alternatives out in the marketplace.
If you’re already a Condens user, nice to see you! Let us know what your experience with the product has been like here.
Here are the most popular repository tools in 2024 with detailed review, features and pricing.
Before we jump into the alternatives, here’s a quick summary on everything Condens.
Condens is a UX research repository tool that’s known for its simple, user-friendly interface and affordable pricing.
You can upload calls, and have them transcribed automatically on Condens. You can also tag sections on the transcripts of every call, and review tagged data in a filterable view or an affinity map like “canvas”.
It also offers the following:
Condens fans love its clean UI and simple interface, especially when compared to more complex competitors like Dovetail.
Condens also makes it easier to share insights with your team (pretty important, we’d say). Instead of requiring users to log in to view insights, you can share them as public links. You don’t have to purchase extra seats for just viewing files.
The Condens support team is also very responsive and helpful. The pricing is affordable, which makes it a great option for easy report building and data analysis.
Condens is great for storing and sharing research data, but it's best as a post-interview project. It doesn't offer any support with setting up user interviews, live recording or note-taking.
Condens does not provide a lot of features for data management, like workspace fields, custom vocabulary, and API.
The integrations are also limited, with a lot of users complaining about how difficult it is to migrate data to Miro boards, for instance.
We tested the same clip on every repository tool on this list. Condens transcripts were of good quality, but struggled a little to distinguish between speakers.
Read More: Tips on repositories from researchers at Google & Razorpay
Condens has four pricing plans: Individual, Team, Business, and Enterprise.
Condens offers a great plan for Individual researchers at $15/month. It’s quite affordable compared to the other products on this list.
Condens include unlimited projects, unlimited sharing of findings, and unlimited file storage in all plans.
The Condens Team plan offers unlimited storage, projects, and access to all analysis features for up to 3 researchers at $190/month.
Condens Team plan will also provide a stakeholder repository.
However, it does not offer granular permission management, single sign-on (SSO), or data security assessments.
The Condens Business plan costs $450/month. It allows up to 5 researchers, unlimited transcription hours, unlimited projects, unlimited sharing of findings, unlimited file storage, and all analysis features.
Unlike the Team plan, Condens Business and Enterprise offers granular permission management, single sign-on (SSO), and data security assessments.
Costing $1200/month, the Condens Enterprise plan allows up to 10 researchers. It offers the same analysis and repository features as the Business plan.
Automate all the tedious, manual parts of a researcher's job. This is us!
Looppanel is an AI-powered research analysis & repository tool for UX Researchers.
The product has been built based on how researchers actually do research—using a discussion guide, notes, and tags.
Calls that are already scheduled on your Google Calendar will automatically show up in the calendar view.
During the call, notes can be taken on the web app or on the Looppanel extension.
Any part of the transcript can be easily turned into a highlight, tagged, and turned into a clip that can be shared with anyone.
As your project takes shape, you can find all your highlights and insights, arranged either by questions or by tags.
All the sharing features in Looppanel are free, starting from bringing in stakeholders to take notes live during user interviews, to watching clips (which you can embed directly into Jira for your engineers to watch) or reviewing insight reports.
We’ve also just launched a smart search that allows Google-like search through your projects and calls, to help you find anything across your projects. It’s basically magic.
Despite both tools having a similar learning curve, Looppanel has an edge over Condens with the auto-generated notes and unlimited collaborators features, along with additional analysis capabilities.
Looppanel wins out when it comes to transcription. We tested the same clip from Forrest Gump 😌and not to brag, but even the sentiment analysis was top-notch.
Like Condens, Looppanel also offers you 15 days for free to test it out.
You also get 5 transcription hours on the app for free.
Looppanel will cost about $30/month and offer 10 transcription hours for teams of up to 3 researchers.
Condens offers the same for $15/month, but without the features of live note-taking, unlimited stakeholder sharing, and Auto-record on Zoom, GMeet or Teams.
Looppanel’s pro plan should easily work for a medium-sized team.
It will cost up to $350 per month ($3500 yearly) for 25 transcription hours monthly.
Condens offers the same for $190-$450/month, based on the number of researchers on your team. The Condens Business plan includes security agreements and Single sign-on (SSO).
For large organizations with legal requirements, the Business plan offers 120 transcription hours/month, SSO, and priority support for $1000 per month.
Condens also offers unlimited transcription hours monthly for its Enterprise plan, costing a higher price of $1200/month instead.
Looppanel also offers a custom Enterprise pricing plan for larger organizations.
Check out Looppanel's list of Best Respository Tools in 2024 here.
Dovetail is a popular UX research repository. It is a web-based platform that lets you organize research data, make notes, and collaborate with team members.
Dovetail is built on the academic approach of qualitative data analysis.
Some bonus features Dovetail offers are:
Condens and Dovetail are both visually appealing UX Research repository tools. Dovetail is a more fleshed-out version of Condens— both have the same basic workflow, with Dovetail being slightly more complex to navigate and learn.
Dovetail has better participant management compared to Condens. You’re able to track who you’ve spoken to over time.
If you prefer an academic approach to building and applying taxonomies, Dovetail also has a robust multi-layer taxonomy system.
Dovetail also has a stronger community of users who you can turn to with questions or concerns on how to use the product. This can be handy when you hit a roadblock or don’t know the best way to set the product up!
We tested the same clip (from Forrest Gump 😌) on both applications. Both transcriptions are of great quality, but only Dovetail identified the two speakers accurately.
Dovetail fan? Find our notes + reviews of alternative research repository tools here.
Dovetail is free to use for 14 days. After this, the starting price is $30 per month or $300 per year.
Dovetail offers 4 paid plans: Starter, Team, Business and Enterprise
Dovetail’s Starter plan is double that of Condens at $30/month.
However, the Dovetail Starter plan allows up to 3 contributors and unlimited free viewer accounts, while Condens does not.
On the other hand, Dovetail limits the number of projects, transcript hours, and storage space depending on the plan. Condens offers these features in an unlimited capacity.
Dovetail Teams offers 10 hours of transcription, and 50 GB storage for teams up to 3 researchers for $375/month. The team plan also offers the ability to keep certain project folders private.
Condens is significantly cheaper in comparison, with unlimited storage, projects, and access to all analysis features, and a stakeholder repository.
Unlike Condens, Dovetail Teams does offer granular permission management, single sign-on (SSO), or data security assessments, as well as EU and USA data hosting options.
Dovetail Business Plan | For teams of 2-10 researchers
At $1800/month, Dovetail’s Business plan is waay more expensive than Condens’ Business Plan at $450 monthly. However, it allows for more contributors, despite a limitation of 100 transcription hours and 500 GB of storage.
Dovetail Business is also built to keep high-strung legal teams happy: you can have different user groups with different permissions, security reviews, and Single Sign-on.
This plan is handy if you have a ginormous team, HIPAA / auto data deletion requirements, or the need for custom legal contracting/support. The pricing is quote-based, contact the Dovetail sales team to know more.
Dovetail is a complex product that will slow down your research process.
Everything from confusing navigation to building a tagging taxonomy before you analyze any data makes Dovetail extremely complicated to use.
It’s also likely to slow down your research process, because you will need to rewatch every user interview (likely multiple times) in order to tag all the data you need.
There is also no room for notes in Dovetail. The only kind of annotation you can do is tagging - which means any notes taken by you or your teammates during the calls end up elsewhere. If you prefer to work with notes rather than tags, you’re also out of luck.
Also horror of horrors, Dovetail now deletes your workspace permanently if you’ve had a free trial version, and choose to not upgrade.
Read More: Tips on repositories from researchers at Google & Razorpay
The most grown-up tool on our list, EnjoyHQ has had enough time to grow and flesh out. It has also gotten some exciting additional features after being acquired by UserZoom (which has now been bought by UserTesting.com). The price hikes however, yikes.
For a small team, EnjoyHQ can still be powerful in the beginning.
EnjoyHQ’s transcription quality is good, but not as accurate as the other tools on this list.
EnjoyHQ provides a stakeholder repository feature, which allows researchers to create and share interactive reports and dashboards with stakeholders, partners, and clients. Condens offers this feature too, but not as extensively for the Individual and Team plans.
It also integrates with UserTesting (no surprise). You can easily import data and insights from UserTesting directly into EnjoyHQ and analyze them alongside other sources of feedback. Condens doesn’t offer this, but supports Slack, Zoom, Google Drive, and other tools through Zapier.
The starting plan on EnjoyHQ is free with features like unlimited transcription and uploads, video editing features, unlimited research projects and (nearly) any integration your heart desires.
The Grow plan is for teams upto 10 people, while Scale is for packs of 25 seats. Pricing is customized based on team size and requirements, so you’ll have to contact Enjoy’s sales team for more information.
Aurelius prides itself on being a UXR tool created by researchers for researchers.
Much like Condens, Aurelius is also suited for after you’ve had your user interview.
While tools like Looppanel and Condens are meant for faster research, Aurelius is more academic in nature.
The transcript generated by Aurelius was just as accurate as the one by Condens. They could do a better job at the way the transcript looks.
Aurelius also requires users to upload separately recorded videos under the “documents” section.
Overall, Aurelius does not add much during the interview process and does not offer basic discussion guides either. It should be considered a post-call tool.
Aurelius will cost about $49 a month and offer unlimited stakeholders, storage, projects, and transcription. Condens will cost $15 a month in comparison but offer just 12 hours of transcription.
Aurelius Premium works best for smaller in-house teams. The cost would be $199 a month.
Condens would cost $190-$450 a month depending on team size, with significantly fewer features, limited stakeholder involvement, report generation, and transcription hours.
Aurelius Premium could work for larger teams as well! In case your team is large enough to require advanced features such as priority support, penetration testing reports, personalized training, etc. — you might want to look into their Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Condens would cost $1200 for 10 users. At this stage, Condens’ price against Aurelius is not justified by the relative ease of using it.
The most cleverly named tool by far, and not the easiest to search for!
Great Question aims to be a one-stop solution for all things research.
They already have solutions for use cases ranging from ReOps to Marketing and design.
We have only approached the tool from the lens of a researcher, since you’re who we write for.
Great Question is more of a fleshed-out product than Condens, with a decent learning curve.
Great Question might get overwhelming for researchers along the way, comparatively. The tool does try to do A LOT at once, which can be off-putting.
We can compare the two on the basis of pricing and features.
As of writing this article, Great Question is still working on the transcript for our Forrest Gump clip 🤔.
Great Question is by far the most comprehensive tool to set up your interview. None of these features are available on Condens.
However, both Great Question and Condens don't offer call recording like Looppanel. Uploading screen recordings of your interviews can be inconvenient.
Great Question offers a decent free version, and four priced plans. The pricing is per seat, unlike Condens’s plans.
Great Question’s free plan is good for solo researchers, allowing 5 interview hours monthly, with 3GB storage and unlimited viewers.
It also offers the option of unlimited studies, which is great for freelancers with multiple clients.
Teams of up to 4 researchers can go for Great Question’s Pro Plan. Each seat costs $15 monthly, with 10 transcription hours and 50 GB storage.
Additionally, you also get the option of rolling and round-robin interview scheduling, with highlight reels to share with stakeholders, and incentives for customers.
Condens’s Team and Business Plans costs $190 - $450 monthly. You don’t get any of the interview scheduling or planning features that Great Question offers.
The Team plan is a great option allowing for unlimited seat options, with each seat costing $35 monthly. It offers 30 interview hours monthly, unlimited viewers, focus groups and study/email templates.
The Scale plan also allows unlimited seats at $85/month, offering custom consent and NDA forms, branding, Qualtrics integration, and concierge repository migration with 65 interview hours monthly.
Larger teams can also explore the Custom plan with custom transcription hour requirements and more options.
Looppanel automatically records your calls, transcribes them, and centralizes all your research data in one place
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